17 PCI-Express SSDs round-up: the fastest SSDs

NVMe tested in many different flavours

By Tomas HochstenbachSaturday 9 September 2017 04:59

Introduction

There is a lot of renewal and progress in the area of fast storage. Time to cover all the recent developments, including a test of 17 PCI-Express SSDs. This way you have an overview of the state of affairs in this market.

The last time we created an overview of the market for PCI-Express SSDs was early 2016. Right now, the situation is a lot different in comparison. This is not shocking, considering the pace at which developments are implemented in this segment. This pace will probably stay the same or even increase, as more and more manufacturers succeed in introducing competitive PCI-Express SSDs.

At the time of writing there is a slight shortage in the SSD market, caused by the lack of NAND flash memory. The prices of SATA600 SSDs have gone up because of it and a lot of PCI-Express SSDs are moderately available. It is unclear how long this situation will persist, but keep this in mind when you look at the prices in this article that we included from our Price Comparison.

In this article we will first cover the current state of affairs, after which we will review the latest models based on our tests. The newer drives are a lot faster, but as with all PCI-Express SSDs the question remains how much of this you will notice in practice. Especially considering the relatively high prices it is important to ask yourself to what extent such an SSD has an added value for your specific use case.

In our last round-up the big winner was this still modern Intel SSD 750.